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Prototype & script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!
Tired of getting swamped in the nitty-gritty of
cross-browser, Web 2.0-grade JavaScript? Get back in the
game with Prototype and script.aculo.us, two extremely
popular JavaScript libraries, that make it a walk in the
park. Be it AJAX, drag and drop, auto-completion, advanced
visual effects, or many other great features, all
you need
is write one or two lines of script that look so good they
could almost pass for Ruby code!
Web applications are getting richer and richer, with more
interaction baked in every day. But JavaScript, DOM, CSS and
a full host of other Web standards are quite complex, and
the result isn't always browser compliant.
The Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries are veritable
treasure troves, smoothing over all the usual nitty-gritty
differences between browsers, and making most common
features a breeze to implement. With this book, you can
quickly wield the whole power of these extraordinary
libraries.
Dive into Prototype, the library that makes JavaScript so
much more powerful, and it looks a lot like Ruby code.
Exploring the DOM, handling events, taming AJAX, and
radically simplifying most of your scripting code: it all
becomes easy-and very portable-with Prototype.
When it comes to advanced UI features, script.aculo.us is
every web developer's dream come true: whether you need to
create auto-completed text inputs, implement in-place
editors, provide customized drag-and-drop behaviors, capture
your users' attention with visual effects or simply build
DOM fragments more efficiently, it's all there, and
lightweight too.
This book guides you through all the details of these
features, letting you use many technologies on the server
side, such as PHP, vanilla Ruby, and Ruby On Rails, in
countless examples illustrating every aspect. Power users
will also learn the design philosophies of the libraries,
and how to contribute to them and augment them for their own
needs.
CONTENTS:
Preface
1Introduction1
IPrototype7
2Discovering Prototype9
3Quick Help with the Dollars31
4Regular JavaScript on Steroids41
5Advanced Collections with Enumerable77
6Unified Event Handling97
7Playing with the DOM Is Finally Fun!119
8Form Management163
9Ajax Has Never Been So Easy177
10More Useful Helper Objects215
11Performance Considerations231
12Wrapping Up235
IIscript.aculo.us243
13Discovering script.aculo.us245
14Visual Effects249
15Drag and Drop
16Autocompletion
17Building DOM Fragments the Easy Way: Builder
18In-Place Editing
19Sliders
20Sound Without Flash379
AExtending and Contributing385
BFurther Reading405
CInstalling and Using Ruby409
Index413
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